Magsam, Joshua
2012-04-17T23:16:37Z
2012-04-17T23:16:37Z
2011-12
http://hdl.handle.net/1794/12150
ix, 203 p. : ill.
As critic Jonathan Gottschall notes, "The literary scholar's subject is ultimately the human mind - the mind that is the creator, subject, and auditor of literary works." The primary aim of this dissertation is to use modern cognitive science to better understand the early modern mind. I apply a framework rooted in cognitive science--the interdisciplinary study of how the human brain generates first-person consciousness and relates to external objects through that conscious framework--to reveal the role of consciousness and memory in subject formation and creative interpretation, as represented in period drama. Cognitive science enables us as scholars and critics to read literature of the period through a lens that reveals subjects in the process of being formed prior to the "self-fashioning" processes of enculturation and social discipline that have been so thoroughly diagnosed in criticism in recent decades. I begin with an overview of the field of cognitive literary theory, demonstrating that cognitive science has already begun to offer scholars of the period a vital framework for understanding literature as the result of unique minds grappling with uniquely historical problems, both biologically and socially. From there, I proceed to detailed explications of neuroscience-based theories of the relationship between the embodied brain, memory, and subject identity, via detailed close reading case studies. In the primary chapters, I focus on what I consider to be three primary elements of embodied subjectivity in drama of the period: basic identity reification through unique first-person memory (the Tudor interlude Jake Juggler ), more complex subject-object relationships leading to alterations in behavioral modes (Hamlet ), and finally, the blending of literary structures and social context in the interpretation of subject behavior (Middleton's A Trick to Catch the Old One ).
Committee in charge: Lisa Freinkel, Chairperson;
George Rowe, Member;
Ben Saunders, Member;
Lara Bovilsky, Member;
Ted Toadvine, Outside Member
en_US
University of Oregon
University of Oregon theses, Dept. of English, Ph. D., 2011;
rights_reserved
British and Irish literature
Cognitive psychology
Psychology
Language, literature and linguistics
England
Cognitive literary theory
Cognitive science
Damasio, Antonio R.
Dramatic literature
Early modern
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616
“The Undiscovered Country”: Theater and the Mind in Early Modern England
Theater and the Mind in Early Modern England
Thesis

Hanan, Rachel Ann, 1978-
2011-05-09T18:00:42Z
2011-05-09T18:00:42Z
2010-09
http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11156
ix, 268 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
"Words in the World" details the ways that the place of rhetoric and literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries changes in response to the transition from natural philosophy to Cartesian mechanism. In so doing, it also offers a constructive challenge to today's environmental literary criticism, challenging environmental literary critics' preoccupation with themes of nature and, by extension, with representational language. Reading authors from Thomas More to Philip Sidney and Ben Jonson through changes in physics, cartography, botany, and zoology, "Words in the World" argues that literature occupies an increasingly separate place from the real world. "Place" in this context refers to spatiotemporal dimensions, taxonomic affiliations, and the relationships between literature and the physical world. George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589), for instance, limits the way that rhetoric is part of the world to the ways that it can be numbered (meter, rhyme scheme, and so forth); metaphor and other tropes, however, are duplicitous. In contrast, for an earlier era of natural philosophers, tropes were the grammar of the universe. "Words in the World" culminates with Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621/1651), in which the product of literature's split from the physical world is literary melancholy. Turning to today's environmental literary criticism, the dissertation thus historicizes ecocriticism's nostalgic melancholy for the extratextual physical world. Indeed, Early Modern authors' inquiries into the place of literature and the relationships between that place and the physical world in terms of literary forms and structures, suggests the importance of ecoformalism to Early Modern scholarship. In particular, this dissertation argues that Early Modern authors treat literary structures as types of performative language. This dissertation revises the standard histories of Early Modern developments in rhetoric and of the literary text, and it provides new insight into the materiality of literary form.
Committee in charge: Lisa Freinkel, Chairperson, English;
William Rossi, Member, English;
George Rowe, Member, English;
Ted Toadvine, Outside Member, Philosophy
en_US
University of Oregon
University of Oregon theses, Dept. of English, Ph. D., 2010;
Renaissance
Natural philosophy
Literature
Rhetoric
Early modern
England
British and Irish literature
English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism
Words in the world: The place of literature in Early Modern England
Place of literature in Early Modern England
Thesis